A.J. Boyle, Seneca Oedipus, Oxford: OUP, 2011, cxxvi + 437 pp. ISBN
978-01-9954-771-5.
A. J. Boyle has for the past twenty plus years made something of an
industry in publishing commentaries on Seneca’s tragedies. The volume
under review, an edition, translation and commentary on Oedipus, follows
his earlier Phaedra (Leeds 19922), Seneca’s Troades (Leeds 1994), Octavia
(Oxford 2008), and as the reviewer was writing this review, one on Medea
appeared as well. The appearance of this book is welcome since it fills a great
need in Senecan studies. It is the first full-scale commentary on the play
in English, and will no doubt serve as a complement and counterweight to
Töchterle’s philological 1997 German Habilitationsschrift, to which Boyle
is indebted. The book is consistently of high quality; scholars of Seneca and
of drama will want the book at hand, and it is a must for all research libraries.
Boyle’s goals for the book are ambitious. As stated in the preface, his
primary aims are “to elucidate the text both dramatically as well as
philologically, and to locate the play firmly in its contemporary historical
and theatrical tradition.” As such, Boyle’s professed audience consists of
drama students, Latin students of every level, and professional scholars of
classics, drama, and literature. Yet, an edition and commentary that attempts
to be everything to everyone often disappoints, failing to satisfy fully any
of the groups it wishes to reach. The book under review, however, does an
admirable job of blending together commentary that does justice to both
the philological and the dramatic issues that the play presents. Scholars of
Seneca will indeed find much of importance in the volume, and students of
drama will benefit from Boyle’s acute and judicious exegesis of the theatrical
elements of the play and its place in the history of theater—though the latter
will often have to wade though a forest of philological exegesis to find what
they are looking for. Students of Latin, on the other hand, especially those
meeting Seneca for the first time, will find the edition somewhat less useful
than the editor believes.
The introduction, occupying over a hundred pages, offers a wealth of
information, a function of the author’s long engagement with Seneca’s
plays and Roman Theater in general. It offers full discussion of: Seneca’s
life and his works; the Republican and Imperial theater; the performance
issue (short; see below); Seneca’s style and language; the myth before Seneca
(noting how rarely the myth was treated in Rome); a full 30-page analysis
of the play itself; an exhaustive survey of the reception of Seneca’s play from
antiquity to the present; and finally a short survey of meter and colometry.
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As might be expected, Boyle reuses a great deal of material from his earlier
works, especially the Octavia (2008), Tragic Seneca (1997), and Roman
Tragedy (2006), though he rewrites it to fit the context and to take in recent
scholarship. For instance, the section on The Roman Theater (xxvi–xliii) is
taken nearly word for word from that in Octavia (xxv–xlii, itself a rewriting
of the introduction of Tragic Seneca), though he more fully considers the
possibility that pantomime could have influenced the tragedies (see p. xli, n.
56), taking into account the recent work by Zimmerman (2008). Likewise,
the section of the Introduction entitled “The Declamatory Style” is a hybrid
of the chapters by the same name in Tragic Seneca and Roman Tragedy,
but recast for the present book.
As he has articulated in his other work on Seneca tragedy, Boyle stands
firmly in favor that Seneca’s tragedies were written with performance in
mind. While I wholeheartedly agree, Oedipus contains the scene—the
extispicy conducted by Manto (303–86)—that is the most difficult to stage.
Yet, it is found nowhere in the introduction and remains relegated to the
commentary, where it is treated thoroughly. Given its importance to the
question, it would have been preferable to alert the reader early on that there
is a significant issue in staging the extispicy. It is a troublesome passage; to
solve it, Boyle adopts the solution of Ahl, Two Faces of Oedipus: Sophocles’
Oedipus Tyrannus and Seneca’s Oedipus (2008), who suggests that
the animals are represented by props, while Manto and the attendants act
symbolically with gestures. Hence Boyle’s stage directions, “Enter Tiresias
and Manto with Attendants from stage left. The Attendants carry sculpted
heads of a bull and a heifer, each with gilded horns.”
Boyle provides a new Latin text and a facing English translation. He
differs from Zweirlein’s OCT in 36 places (conveniently listed on pp. 91–
92), and proves to be a more conservative textual critic than Zwierlein,
preferring manuscript readings over conjectures, even where the text is in
doubt. He adopts the surely correct emendation of Fitch at 1052–53. At 560,
however, he rejects Heinsius’ emendation (claustra Lethaei lacus) for the
mss. claustra letalis lacus as “unnecessary” (ad loc.), although comparison
of phrases involving claustra and a genitive in the Senecan corpus reveals
that it is always paired with a proper noun (Oed. 160, 401, Tro. 430, HO
1311). Also, at 822–24, Boyle defends the mss. reading penes quos instead
of Zweirlein’s emendation penes quem; the mss. reading is, pace Boyle, not
supported by his interpretation of line 837, which does not indicate more
than one herdsman.
To keep the text as clean as possible, Boyle provides the (selective) critical
apparatus in a separate section that follows the text (pp. 80–90).
Boyle’s translation is “meant to convey to the Latinless reader as much
as it is possible to convey in English and without violation of English idiom
about the form and meaning of the play (cxxiv).” The translation is vigorous
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and readable, and aptly represents the Latin in idiomatic English. In an
attempt to help Latin students, Boyle frequently offers the literal translation
of the Latin in the commentary; presumably he recognizes that students will
use the translation as a guide to the Latin. At times, the translation drifts a
bit far from the original: line 26: “You think the impossible and dread it,”
does not really represent quod posse fieri non putes metuas tamen. At line
70: the translation “Help itself becomes diseased” lacks the point of morbus
auxilium trahit, which reiterates the “falling” healers (cadunt medentes)
of the first part of the line by emphasizing how the disease “drags down”
help. At line 138: in the description of the plague, taurus…labitur segnis
does not mean “the bull…slowly sank,” but that the “the bull collapsed in
lethargy” In line 162: sua motam ripa is omitted, which emphasizes the
inversion of normalcy (a point Boyle emphasizes at every point). At line 232
(emicat vasto fragore maior humano sonus), the translation “A loud crack
lights the air, a sound beyond human” does not really capture the effect of a
booming, other-worldly voice emanating and thundering from the chasm;
“lights” seems too literal for emicat since it is the suddenness that is being
described. At line 289, Tiresias arrives, Tiresia tremulo tardus accelerat
genu; in an attempt, presumably, to keep the alliteration, Boyle translates
“Here…/ Rushes tardy Tiresias—his knees tremble,” but surely “tardy” will
be taken to mean something different than Boyle intends, “late in coming”
rather than “slowed by age” (as Boyle suggests in the commentary). For
another place where alliteration affects the translation see line 106 ille, ille
dirus callidi monstri cinis (the Sphinx), where dirus…cinis is rendered
“that dire dust.”
The outstanding commentary consists of a combination of philological,
analytic, and interpretative notes, along with occasional remarks about the
grammar to help the student of Latin (with references to Woodcock’s New
Latin Syntax). The notes are keyed to both the Latin text and the English
translation when the exegesis is helpful to both scholars and those who do
not control Latin. Yet, Boyle is not always consistent. To take a few random
examples: at 80–81, the lemma is “iamdudum/It’s late, but:” even though the
note is only understandable to Latin readers. At 240–41 the lemma is “functi/
dead,” but the note will not be understandable to English-only readers: “for
functus = defunctus, see also 579 below, Med. 999, Thy. 14.” All Latin
in the book is duly translated, but other modern languages, especially the
number of French quotations, remain untranslated.
The exegetical notes cover a wide range of subjects, including technical
points such as metrical features and lexical parallels, matters of dramaturgy,
reception of Seneca’s works (esp. by Corneille, Voltaire, Dryden, and Lee),
parallels in other Senecan plays, and exploration of possible intertexts with
Catullus, Lucretius, Vergil, and Ovid. In some cases the intertexts are obvious
from verbal parallels, such as ad 166–70 (part of the plague scene) where the
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reference to Charon is indebted to Vergil (p. 154; more below), but others are
more suggestive. One wonders, for example, if the geographical echoes of
Catullus 11 actually would bring to mind in “some members of his audience”
the “personal devastation wrought by sex” (p. 145 ad 110–23) found in the
latter part of Catullus’ poem. Other texts to which Seneca is supposed to
have alluded are improbable—especially in the absence of lexical connections.
For instance, at 160–65 (the plague scene), Boyle states that “Seneca takes
his cue from Virgil’s plague, esp. Geo. 3.551–3,” but there is no reason to
suspect that Seneca had Vergil in mind here: in the latter, Tisiphone (named
specifically) is sent forth from the shadows into the light, whereas in Seneca
it is the “throng of sisters” that have “burst forth” from hell; again, in Vergil
Tisiphone drives Diseases and Fear before her as she emerges, but in Seneca
black Death itself “opens its maw and unfurls its wings.” At other times, the
desire to offer an intertext comes at the expense of analyzing the differences.
In the scene describing Charon mentioned above, Boyle notes the lexical
similarities, but omits describing how Seneca has made Charon, an old but
vigorous god in Vergil, into an exhausted and worn-out figure.
After over twenty-five years of producing commentaries, Boyle
intimately knows Seneca’s tragedies, and the commentary really shines in its
explication of how Oedipus relates to the other plays in the Senecan corpus.
He is equally good at providing philological parallels and at explicating
how Oedipus’ dramaturgy fits in with or diverges from practices in the
other plays. See, e.g., his comments on asides in Seneca ad 103–5, p. 139.
Only by chance did I catch a place where a crucial parallel in another play
was unexplored: at Oed. 142–44 (dominum...prodidit p. 150), Boyle notes
that the use of dominum (here “master of the horse,” “rider”) is interesting
because of “Oedipus’ status as dominus,” but he does not provide parallels
from Phaedra where dominus means “rider” (lines 1089, 1100, 1102). Thus,
his claim that the phrase dominum...prodidit foreshadows “another Theban
dominus betrayed by his own animals, Actaeon (751–63)” seems particularly
far-fetched. Here it just means “rider.”
There is, to my mind, an oversized emphasis on Stoicism, despite the
overall claim (lxxx) “this is no Stoic world, but one irremediably diseased.”
In some cases, explanation of a Stoic concept seems warranted (e.g. fatum ad
18–19, p. 115), but frequently there is a discussion of Stoicism even though it
cannot possibly be relevant to understanding the text at hand. Perhaps the
most egregious example of this is ad 187–88 (sacer ignis pascitur artus, the
plague scene again). Sacer ignis is clearly erysipelas, as Boyle informs us,
but for some reason there is appended at the end of this note the following:
“‘Fire’, ignis, had a particular charge for the Stoics, who saw fire either as
nature itself (so Zeno: Cic. ND 2.57) or as its prime element, which persisted
forever and into which all else is dissolved (Von Arnim, 1903–24: II.413; Sen.
NQ 3.13.1).” There is nothing objectionable to the content, but it lures the
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reader into trying to figure out how Stoic fire is to be mapped onto what
is simply a medical condition. Is it not time for us to stop seeking Stoic
influences in every nook and cranny in the Senecan tragedies?
Despite the minor points raised here, Boyle is to be commended for
lending his deft touch to Seneca’s Oedipus. I use the word “touch” (ars)
purposefully, because what Boyle brings to this and other plays is an artist’s
sensibility, one that does not take away from his considerable philological
acumen. It is in this respect that his book differs from Töchterle’s deeply
philological, almost scientific, work, and this is what makes Boyle’s book so
valuable and timely.
R. Scott Smith
University of New Hampshire
[email protected]
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